


Echoes and Eight Feet of Air

by onvavoir



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Depression, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-11
Updated: 2015-05-11
Packaged: 2018-03-30 00:31:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3916462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onvavoir/pseuds/onvavoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day, Matt just can't get up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes and Eight Feet of Air

One day, Matt just can't get up. 

It's not the bruises or a cracked rib or worry about work. He just... can't. Suddenly the air around him is too heavy and pushes back on him, pins him down in his bed until even the slightest movement seems impossible. His breath sighs out of him, just as heavy. His limbs are made of lead. He pulls the covers over his head until it's too hot to breathe under them. He hunches up like an inchworm, face-down on the softness of the sheets, knees up underneath him.

The alarm goes off, and he slaps it quiet. In two hours he has to be at work. Two hours. If he gets up now, he'll have plenty of time to make breakfast and shower and approach the day in a leisurely fashion. He stays under the covers. Drifts.

When he comes back to himself, he reaches to slap the clock, and now it's 8.17. Forty-five minutes. If he gets up now, he can quickly shower and grab a bagel and get to work at more or less nine o' clock. He'll have to hurry.

At 8.52 he calls Foggy, who probably thinks he was out late as Daredevil and thinks he's sleeping off an injury. He understands, and Matt's grateful. Beneath the immediate relief of knowing he doesn't have to get up bubbles the guilt that says he's fine, there's nothing wrong with you, what's your fucking problem, get up! Things no one has ever said to him but which echo in his brain nonetheless, like memories of dreams. Conversations he's afraid of having because he can imagine them too vividly going bad. His chest aches with nothing, and while he's lying there on his back with the phone in easy reach, a tear slides out of each eye and into the porches of his ears. Nothing is wrong, and yet everything is.

At least anger feels like something. The rage that sends him out seeking for violence and brutality, that's better than numbness and emptiness. It feels like energy. It's not being half-asleep and half-alive. Even when it consumes him, even when all he wants to do is hit and punch and break indiscriminately, it's at least something that isn't this emotional heat death. The slow collapse of his internal universe into blackness too dense for light to escape. An event horizon of pointless, sourceless misery.

Maybe death would be better, he thinks sometimes, but death is so permanent, and what would they do without him, the city and his friends? How would they forgive him for burdening them with another coffin, another headstone, another funeral and another void. No, he can't bring himself to do it, not by his own hand, and if he were going to die out there, a martyr to self-righteous pricks with the weight of the world on their shoulders, it would have happened already. His sentence is life.

He endures. He is too warm to put on a shirt but too cool to be comfortable. The passage of time is something he could mark, if he chose, second by second by minute by hour, but he's given himself over to the haze of disregard for the hours he's lost. He can hear the changes in the world outside. Morning traffic and then the soap operas from upstairs. He's aware of the pang in his stomach, but it's as distant as the siren wailing two miles away. He gets up only when his bladder makes it necessary. He's glad, sometimes, that he doesn't have to face himself in the mirror. He can plod back to bed and roll onto it and stare up at a ceiling that is echoes and eight feet of air away. 


End file.
